A Philosophical Happy Hour on the Past, Present, and Future of Thomism and its philosophy: must it change? Can it? Is it “relevant”?
Not including the works of St. Thomas himself, nor of his Latin Age commentators and followers, I have four full shelves of books that one might consider “Thomistic”. These books, written as early as 1891 and as late as 2023, comprise nearly every topic of perennial philosophical concern: knowledge, ethics, metaphysics, politics, the natural world, human soul, and everything in-between. Some belong to the same schools of interpretation. Others are more idiosyncratic. Each takes St. Thomas for its guide. But St. Thomas seems, at times, quite a manic thinker, based on the differing interpretations of his doctrines. One might joke that if you gather a bunch of Thomists in one room, there will be as many varieties of Thomism in that room as there are Thomists.
Is “Thomism”, then, as it is being pursued one-quarter through the 21st century—apparently quite fragmentary—truly something coherent? Or does it only appear united from the outside, by its opposition to the secular and non-Thomistic world? If it is, in what does its future consist?
The Difficulties of Retrieving Thomism
In an essay now 50 years old, Fr. W. Norris Clarke, S.J., asked some of these same questions. As Fr. Clarke saw the issue, we today oft are inhibited from sharing Aquinas’ brilliance by his difficulty. In Fr. Clarke’s words:
The substantive content of St. Thomas’ metaphysical vision is extremely rich and profound, as I think anyone will agree who has been willing to take the time and effort to make himself at home in it. But it also seems to me a fact, as a teacher, that there is a serious block to the accessibility of this content for the ordinary educated contemporary thinker, even Christian, who has not submitted himself to long scholarly specialization in the texts of St. Thomas, the history of medieval philosophy, and the subsequent history of Thomism. Thus students ordinarily find St. Thomas one of the most difficult of Western philosophers to approach directly on their own in his own texts, without the help of very ample introduction and detailed commentary.
This arises from the fact that St. Thomas’ thought comes to us encased in a whole tightly knit technical framework of Aristotelian logic, terminology, methodology of scientific knowledge (in the Aristotelian meaning of science), and scientific world view (philosophy of nature), which was once the common patrimony of the thinking West but is now so difficult of access without a long apprenticeship that few contemporary thinkers are willing to invest the time and effort required, especially since the limitations of the technical framework are now more evident.
Clarke 1974: “What Is Most and Least Relevant in the Metaphysics of St. Thomas Today?” International Philosophical Quarterly, 14.4: 411.
Fr. Clarke here articulates insightfully a challenge every would-be-teacher of Thomas faces. We stand now at 750 years’ distance from Aquinas’ death. The context in which he wrote his words and within which their intelligibility shines forth fully proves difficult to convey for the uninitiated. Translations often mislead. And the whole of Aquinas’ thought—the cosmic coherence of an intelligible universe reflected by our own minds, within our own souls—seems foreign and even mystical or mythic to minds deadened by an atmosphere of cosmological nihilism and scientistic reductionism.
Adherents of Aquinas know well, in fact, that his teaching is neither mystical nor incoherent—but also that presentation of his insights in an accessible manner seems almost impossible. Thus, Thomists exhibit a tendency to withdraw from the world and instead speak among themselves: leading perhaps to a better understanding of St. Thomas for some, but oftener than not, internecine debates that undermine rather than bolster its broader appeal.
Future Developments of Thomism
Further, with its principles rooted in thought more than seven centuries old—principles oft debated and disagreed over by its adherents—Thomism perhaps seems ill-suited to the challenges of today. While Aquinas himself adopted and developed thinking from thinkers even farther removed (Aristotle’s death in 322BC, after all, was over 1500 years before Thomas’ birth), the changes wrought to our environments by modernity are profound. Can Aquinas truly speak to them? Can Thomists, while remaining faithful to Thomas?
Clarke, in his brief essay (which can be downloaded here), outlines eight points he believes Thomistic metaphysics can still teach us.
- The correlativity of spirit and being.
- The existential meaning of being.
- The explanation of the one and the many.
- The notion of person as the highest mode of being.
- The dynamic notion of substance as explaining self-identity through change.
- The notion of substantial potency as show how complex natural wholes can develop.
- The theory of efficient and final causality as binding the universe into a whole.
- The relation to God as the ultimate Source and Goal of all being.
Are these topics ripe for future development or do they serve only as points of retrieval? (Clarke was himself fond of the phrase, “creative retrieval”, as signifying something of both at once.) What does Thomism have to tell us about, say, technology? Or post-liberal politics in a global age? Are there new doctrines of Thomism itself; new conclusions to be derived from its principles?
Thomism in Dialogue
Finally, we must ask as St. Thomas himself would have doubtless: what can be said to a doctrine by some other? It is an accusation, understandable but inexcusable, that Thomism presents a “closed system”. That it have this appearance follows only from its comprehensiveness and the wide reach of its principles. But Aquinas himself was nothing if not a master of the dialectic: the sorting between opinions to discover threads of truth.
Many opinions that Aquinas did not himself consider have been lobbed into philosophical discourse since the 13th century. Questions have been raised that he did not answer. Different answers have been given to questions he did. New thinkers have proposed new thoughts. Entirely new traditions have arisen (and many passed away).
Thus it is worthwhile to ask: do these add anything to or extend anything within Thomism? May it be cross-pollinated with phenomenology? Does the analytic tradition bring an additional rigor? Can semiotics enhance a Thomist’s vision?
Talk Thomism with Us
Using Fr. Clarke’s essay as a basis, we’ll take up these and other related questions this Wednesday. You, dear reader, are most welcome to join us! Sign up for the mailing list by clicking below, or join us live (just us a real name). We look forward to hearing your questions and comments on the Future of Thomism!
philosophical happy hour
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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.
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